MILWAUKEE (JTA) – A federal lawsuit alleges that a Milwaukee weatherman and two other former employees of a local television station suffered discrimination because they are Jewish.
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The lawsuit against Scripps Media Inc., the parent company of WTMJ-TV, was filed in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Monday.
The incidents alleged by the weatherman, Scott Steele, took place between 2014 and 2017 and included twice finding a Christian cross and once a yarmulke left on his desk. The lawsuit also alleges a “constant struggle for Steele and other Jewish employees to take time off for Jewish holidays.” Steele alleges he was demoted to a “lesser role” at the station after requesting time off for holidays.
“Scripps began a campaign of retaliation against Steele for speaking up to protest the anti-Semitic discrimination workplace hostility he was suffering, and his criticism of the culture of discrimination at WTMJ 4,” the complaint said. “Scripps then manufactured false workplace ‘incidents’ against Steele, disciplined him for the imagined incidents, and ultimately wrongfully terminated his employment by the end of summer 2017.”
The lawsuit charges that tensions boiled over at a 2017 staff meeting called after management received an anonymous complaint and a staff survey where issues of anti-Semitism and discrimination were raised, according to the Journal Sentinel.
Steele filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year.
Scripps did not comment to the newspaper, citing the pending litigation.
This incidents happen all of the time in the workplace; one time, this farbisen detective with the NYPD out of the blue stated to me:
“Why should you get off for Christmas, since you take off for all of the Jewish holidays”.
I saw that I was dealing with an ignoramus; he didn’t realize, or should have realized that any time that I took off for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Succot, Pesach, and Shevouth, came out of my personal leave and vacation time. The City of NY never gave me time off for those Yom Tovim, on its own volition. As far as taking off on the gentile holiday noted above, it happens to be a federal holiday, which our union mandated that we were eligible to be off for, in addition to New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, President’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving.
There was always the undercurrent of anti-semitism, at another place of employment, where I would leave earlier on Friday afternoon, during the winter, because of Shabbos. Again, that came out of my personal leave on vacation. However, there was one individual who would routinely hit the bottle, as he was a shiker. He would always “become sick” on Monday, and not show up. The latter conduct was tolerated.
When I took off over a week for Shiva, the same alcoholic had the nerve to state when I came back “how was your vacation”. I even had to go to the local library, make copies of the Laws of Shiva (50 pages), which I dumped on my Supervisor’s desk, to shut her up. Alas, this is what goes on in the work place.
The media, all of it, are an evil empire. One should run from them at all costs.
This is not anti Semitic that constitutes a lawsuit in my opinion